Prospects for livestock production, marketing implications post-Brexit and a positive restoration of relationships with the Food Standards Agency (FSA) at operational level were all under review at the 2016 Conference of the Association of Independent Meat Suppliers (AIMS).
Speaker Terry Jones, National Farmers’ Union (NFU) director general, considered the implications of Brexit and focused largely on international trade, access to labour and the future of domestic agricultural policy to replace the CAP.
The options the NFU has outlined in its post Brexit paper for replacing the CAP support include no financial help at all for producers, as happened in New Zealand. According to Jones, many young farmers were keen on the New Zealand model, but felt it was an unlikely outcome as short-term adjustments would be too painful for many producers.
Jones also explained to delegates that there was no doubt that the solutions would not be arrived at quickly: “This is more of a marathon and not a sprint. However, our members are urging us to be bold and ambitious in what we propose and a bespoke option cannot be ruled out.”
International speaker on global food issues, professor David Hughes, also spoke at the conference and warned the meat sector to avoid the battleground where industrially produced poultry and fish were constantly competing and look for the spaces in-between.
AIMS’ head of policy, Norman Bagley, also took the opportunity to launch the organisation’s Assured Meat Processing Standard (AMPS) that is set to be a fully accredited ISO17065 scheme which focuses on an entry level for small/medium size businesses that do not supply directly into the multiple retailer sector.
Bagley explained that AMPS, which is open to all businesses, has three main principles: ensuring product safety, legality and welfare.
Finally chief operating officer of the FSA, Jason Feeney, addressed conference delegates in light of AIMS uniting trade bodies to voice their concerns that the FSA was showing unwarranted bias against the meat sector.
Feeney said that whilst it had been a testing few weeks at a strategic level, understanding at an operational level had improved and he was now “optimistic that a sustainable model for meat inspection would be ready to put before the board by the end of the calendar year.”
This story was originally published on a previous version of the Meat Management website and so there may be some missing images and formatting issues.
